European bishops call on EU to welcome migrants fleeing war, poverty

SIMON CALDWELL │ Catholic News Service

6/23/15

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon delivers a speech in the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France, June 23. Ban spoke within the regular parliamentary assembly, which was expected to discuss Europe's migrant situation.

A migrant is assisted after arriving in Reggio Calabria, Italy, May 4. The Italian Coast Guard said at least 10 migrants died off Libya as they tried to cross the Mediterranean. Bishops across Europe have called for wider acceptance of migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

Libyan security forces in Tajura, Libya, May 17, detain alleged migrants trying to make their way to Europe. According to reports, the Libyan security services claim to have detained hundreds of people attempting to enter Europe. Bishops across Europe have called for wider acceptance of migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa.

MANCHESTER, England - Bishops across the European Union are
calling on member states to be generous toward tens of
thousands of migrants flooding across the Mediterranean.

French, German and Italian bishops have issued formal
statements in response to a crisis that has seen more than
100,000 migrants, many of them refugees from wars in Syria
and Eritrea, cross into Italy, Greece and Malta from North
Africa and Turkey.

With an estimated 450,000 to 500,000 migrants gathering in
Libya, the EU has decided that the crisis constitutes the
first ever "emergency situation" that allows provisional
measures under the 2007 Lisbon Treaty.

Because the vast majority of migrants are landing in Italy
and Greece, the European Commission is seeking, under the
treaty, to relocate the migrants to other nations based on
factors such as population, gross domestic product and
unemployment as well as the number of refugees already taken
in.

European ministers met June 16 to discuss mandatory quotas
for the resettlement of 40,000 migrants across the EU and to
consider how to break up human trafficking gangs.

But proposals have met with opposition from a significant
number of member states and through June 23 no agreement has
been reached.

The French interior minister has complained that many of the
migrants are "illegal" while Spain has objected to accepting
migrants when it its unemployment rate stands at 23 percent.
The Polish prime minister has voiced opposition to mandatory
quotas in principle.

The United Kingdom and Denmark, two of three countries with a
right to opt-in to asylum policies, have each refused to
accept any of the migrants at all.

COMECE, the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the
European Community, supported the European Commission's
proposals for mandatory quotas across member states as soon
as they were announced May 13.

Father Patrick Daly, COMECE general secretary, told Catholic
News Service that the quotas were an attempt by the
commission to resolve the problem at a European level and was
therefore an expression of the Catholic principle of
solidarity.

"For the Catholic Church, the fundamental principle
underlying the migration issue is one of deep and profound
compassion for those on the front edge: the migrants
themselves who are seeking asylum in our shores, those who
have placed their hopes on a better life in Europe, and there
is also sensitivity for those countries on the front line,
particularly Italy and Greece," Father Daly said.

"What the church is very much in favor of is an optimum both
for the receiving countries and those in need of relocation
in the EU," he added.

The permanent council of the French bishops' conference
issued a declaration June 17 to urge the Catholics of their
country to show more hospitality to migrants.

"The dignity of human beings is at stake," said the statement
signed by Archbishop Georges Pontier of Marseille, conference
president, Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois of Paris and eight
others.

Catholics in France should change their attitudes to migrants
and "overcome their prejudices and fears," the bishops said.

"For many reasons, often very dramatic - wars, poverty,
climate disruption - many are forced to leave their country
where they cannot live," they said.

"It is not possible to close in on ourselves and ignore the
misery of so many men, women and children around the world
who seek only to live in dignity," they added. "We urge our
leaders to intensify international cooperation to meet the
challenges. Europe must especially take responsibility and
call the constituent countries to provide a real response."

The same day, the German bishops' conference and the
Protestant Evangelical Church in Germany issued a joint
statement pleading for a "more generous reception of refugees
from the Middle East in Germany."

The churches also called on Germans to do more to assist
those refugees remaining in camps across the Middle East.

"The people of Syria and Iraq now need our help and our
solidarity, said Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and
Freising, president of the German bishops' conference."
Please support the work of aid agencies in the region."

On June 16, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa, Italy,
president of the Italian bishops' conference, along with
eight bishops of Liguria province along the French border
issued a statement in response to the growing number of
migrants attempting to cross into France, where they had been
refused entry.

They asked Catholics to open their hearts "to these brothers
and sisters in humanity, so sorely tried and in search of a
better and safer life."

They also demanded that the EU act swiftly so Italy was not
left to cope with the influx of migrants alone, decrying the
response of many EU states to the crisis as "hard-hearted and
indifferent."

The Vatican made its own intervention on the eve of the
meeting of EU ministers. Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, who heads
the Holy See's Permanent Observer Mission to the U.N. in
Geneva, told the world body in Geneva the international
community was ineffectively managing migration.

Noting that since January, 1,800 migrants had died while
attempting to cross the Mediterranean, he said that "search
and rescue operations should continue and be further
strengthened, as the need to protect the right to life of
all, regardless of their status, must remain the priority."

He called for resettlement in Europe and other parts of the
world to be "effectively carried out and more fairly
distributed, with due attention for security and social
needs, but without acquiescing to irrational populist
pressures."

Such populist pressures are evident in the U.K., where
migration has become such a potent political issue that Prime
Minister David Cameron, a conservative, won the May general
election only after he promised a referendum on whether
Britain should exit the EU in order to control its borders.

Royal Navy vessels are involved in search and rescue
operations in the Mediterranean with one British ship
plucking 1,200 migrants from flimsy boats off Libya in a
single day. However, the British government is sensitive to
the rise of anti-immigration sentiments among the electorate
in reaction to the relocation of some 300,000 internal EU
migrants to the U.K. each year.

It has therefore refused to accept any migrants crossing the
Mediterranean, pledging to tackle the problem "at source"
instead, a policy which was described as "horrible" by
Auxiliary Bishop William Kenney of Birmingham, former
chairman of Caritas Europe who about a decade ago personally
helped in the recovery of the bodies of a number of drowned
migrants from beaches in Spain.

Bishop Kenney told CNS that "people do just not realize the
horror and the poverty that these people are fleeing from."

"We have an obligation to look after these people... the
reason being that they are men and women made in the image of
almighty God," he said.

The plan for quotas, which is also opposed by Slovakia,
Hungary and the Czech Republic, will be discussed at a summit
of the 28-member EU June 25-26.